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Inside Donald Trump’s Extremist Education Agenda

Inside Donald Trump’s Extremist Education Agenda

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency left education policy experts at a complete loss to explain what this would mean for the nation’s schools. During his campaign, Trump gave few clues about what would inform his education leadership, only that he had some antipathy for the Department of Education, he was no fan of Common Core and he would advocate for more “school choice.”

After his election, experienced education journalists at Education Week predicted Trump would embrace conservative Beltway think tanks and state education policy leaders who had bristled under the rule of Obama’s education department, and would reject the influence of teachers unions, civil rights groups, and politically centrist education “reform” groups.

Many who pointed out “personnel is policy,” speculated Trump would pick an education secretary from the ranks of his transition advisers who came mostly from the above-mentioned DC-based circles and state government centers. Other knowledgeable sources predicted Trump might draw education policy knowhow from “outsider” sources, such as the military, big business or the charter school industry.

Not a single source I can find anticipated Trump would look for education expertise in the deep, dark well he repeatedly seems to draw from: the extremist, right-wing evangelical community.

The DeVos Nomination

The first clue that Trump would embed the extremist views of radical Christian orthodoxy in the White House’s education policy apparatus was his nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the nation’s next Secretary of Education.

As Politico reports, DeVos is a “billionaire philanthropist” who “once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’”

Politico reporters point to numerous recordings and interviews in which DeVos and her husband Dick, a billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, promote education policies as avenues to “greater Kingdom gain … lament that public schools have ‘displaced’ the Church as the center of communities,” and refer to their efforts to advance private, religious schools as a “Shephelah,” an area where battles, including between David and Goliath, were fought in the Old Testament.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Katherine Stewart, an expert observer of the Christian right, writes, “Betsy DeVos stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right.”

Stewart points to numerous examples of DeVos-related family foundations that have generously donated to “conservative groups” pushing religious right doctrine including, the Alliance Defending Freedom,” the legal juggernaut of the religious right,” and “Colorado-based Christian ministry Focus on the Family.”

But Trump’s selection of DeVos for education secretary is not the only clue that the nation’s education policy may be in for a sharp veer to the religious right. As Stewart reports, “The president-elect’s first move on public education [was] Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the nation … Liberty University teaches creationism alongside evolution.”

Falwell Jr. Came First

The Associated Press was first to break the story about Falwell Jr. being offered the job, reporting also that he declined it saying, “He couldn’t afford to work at a Cabinet-level job for longer than [two years] and didn’t want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.”

“Here is Trump, ready to hand the job [of Secretary of Education] to a religious zealot whose sole goal,” writes Michelangelo Signorile, the Gays and Lesbians editor for the Huffington Post, “would likely be to infuse evangelical Christian doctrine into public schools.”

Signorile also calls Falwell Jr. an “enemy of LGBTQ rights” and states, “It’s hard to believe Falwell would continue the Obama administration’s pro-LGBTQ programs if he actually became Secretary of Education, nor would he likely take the job with any stipulation that he must so.”

Need more evidence that Trump will usher in an education agenda largely dominated by the evangelical community? Another candidate Trump also considered for education secretary was Larry Arnn.

The Hillsdale College Connection

As the Daily Caller reports, “Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College, a small conservative liberal arts school in Michigan known for declining all federal funds.”

Hillsdale College, located in Hillsdale, Michigan (the Devos family’s home state), is regarded as “the conservative Harvard,” in some circles, and has been the recipient of generous donations from numerous funders of the rightwing conservative movement including the Koch brothers’ family foundation. Hillsdale also sponsors the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Hillsdale students overwhelmingly supported Trump for president, according to the campus newspaper, and at least seven Hillsdale professors and administrators publicly endorsed him.

According to an article in The Atlantic, Hillsdale is one among a number of conservative private colleges that rejects federal funds including financial aid for students. Many of these colleges, while they are rejecting federal funds, “are seeking, exemptions from the US Department of Education from provisions under Title IX of the laws governing higher education, which protects students from discrimination in housing, athletics, and access to facilities on the basis of such things as gender, sexual orientation, sex or pregnancy outside marriage, or having an abortion.”

Hillsdale has a long-held reputation for discriminating on the basis of gender preference and identity, and news outlets in the LGBT community have reported incidents in which Hillsdale staff and officials openly discriminated against gay students.

Arnn also came under fire from many liberal sources for describing nonwhite students as “dark ones” during a state legislature subcommittee hearing regarding the adoption of Common Core State Standards. Hillsdale’s official apology for that incident was arguably worse than Arnn’s remark, a Michigan blogger notes, as the college used its apology as another opportunity to take a swipe at government enforcement of affirmative action policies.

In addition to Hillsdale’s strong resentment of federal intrusion, especially on issues of civil rights, the college also has deep commitments to another favorite of conservative, religious advocates: charter schools.

A Chain Of Religion-Based Charter Schools

As I report in an in-depth investigation of the conservative movement’s influence on charter school expansions in Colorado, in addition to reinforcing gender and race inequity, Hillsdale operates the Barney Charter School Initiative, which is essentially a consultant service for a chain of 16 charter schools called Classical Academies. These charters purport to offer “the same course of study that helped propel Western Civilization to the top of the world,” according to what at least one of these schools says on its website.

The Barney project’s strong political agenda was revealed in its former mission statement, since taken down, which said the Initiative seeks to “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” The statement also said, “The charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education.”

Charter schools created with the help of the Barney Initiative are also proving to be an ideal vehicle for evading laws enforcing separation of church and state. Since my investigation into the opening of a Barney-related charter in Colorado called Golden View Classical Academy, an independent news outlet in that state confirms the school indeed provides students a religion-based curriculum on the taxpayers’ dime.

As Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent reports, charter schools like Golden View “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”

Goodland recalls when Golden View applied to the district school board for approval, the school’s director “assured the board Golden View would not use a religious curriculum” and “agreed to comply with the intent of Colorado’s sexual education law by providing ‘appropriate instruction on human anatomy, reproduction and sexuality.’”

Yet, she notes the school’s family handbook, “adopted before the charter application was approved includes references to teaching about sexual intercourse only “in the context of a monogamous relationship between two people of opposite sexes,” a focus on abstinence, admonitions on “the moral and physical consequences of promiscuous sex,” and the “limited effectiveness” of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

Goodlad blames a loose, unregulated waiver process for allowing charter schools like Golden View to skirt state laws, and she points to Colorado public officials  who provide charters ample leeway to ensure they have the  “autonomy” which they claim justifies their existence.

Keep in mind, Barney-related charters like Golden View, that essentially function like private religious schools while receiving taxpayer money, are scattered across the country; their network is growing, and a Trump administration that has pledged to provide more money for “school choice” will only help fuel more rapid expansions of these schools.

“Neither the public nor lawmakers understand the extent of the problem,” Goodlad concludes.

How DeVos And Hillsdale Intersect

Unsurprisingly, Hillsdale president Arnn says Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, “is someone he ‘knows and admires,’” according to right-wing news outlet Breitbart.

And why not, since Hillsdale also has strong ties to DeVos and her immediate family.

As the Hillsdale campus newspaper reports, DeVos’s “roots in Michigan philanthropy run deep and also intersect with Hillsdale College. Betsy DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, a 1992 graduate of Hillsdale College and the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, now named Academi. In 2009, the DeVos family also founded ArtPrize, an international art competition that featured the work of five art professors and students this year. Most notably, Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, co-founded Amway with Jay Van Andel. Van Andel’s son, Steve, was a 1978 graduate of Hillsdale and currently serves as the chairman of Amway. In 2013, after he donated to graduate school scholarships and operations, Hillsdale named its graduate school of statesmanship in his honor.”

Jay Van Andel was also, at the time of his death, a trustee of Hillsdale College, according to Wikipedia.

Most Extremist Administration Ever?

“Those who know DeVos say her goals are not sinister,” Politico reporters caution, “though they acknowledge the policies she’s likely to advance would benefit Christian schools. In fact, Trump’s $20 billion school choice program that would allow low-income students to select private or charter schools was devised with the help of the advocacy group DeVos headed until recently.”

Despite the strong evidence Trump’s education agenda may be driven by right-wing evangelicals, advocates for charter schools in the Democratic Party keep looking for reasons to believe Betsy DeVos is not going to be the extremist she is often portrayed as in media reports.

On hearing the news of the DeVos nomination, the politically centrist hedge fund-backed Democrats for Education Reform released a statement congratulating DeVos on her appointment and applauding her “commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools,” while at the same time regretting that her nomination is the outcome of a political campaign driven by “bigoted and offensive rhetoric.” (Never mind the charter schools DeVos helped grow in Michigan seem less than “high quality.”)

Another centrist Democrat deeply embedded in the investment community, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Partners, hopes a Trump administration will offer up a plan for charter school expansion that includes “sweeteners for the Congressional Black Caucus” – a condescending and white privilege phrase if there ever was one.

Emma Brown, the education reporter for the Washington Post, notes many advocates for charter schools “worry” Trump’s embrace of charter schools may be identified with his “rhetoric about immigrants, inner cities, and women,” but still hope some kind of “strong accountability” will be in the new administration’s charter school governance, even though those accountability measures have proven to be easily gamed by the savviest charter operators.

“Playing the politics of niceness has never been so convenient for the Dems of education reform,” writes college professor and former charter school leader-turned reform critic Andre Perry. “DeVos’s belief in limited state oversight, for-profit charter management, and vouchers didn’t give Democrat proponents of charter schools any pause in the past. And for many it doesn’t now.”

If Perry is correct, that’s a shame, because anyone who strives for a clear-eyed view of the Trump administration’s oncoming education agenda will find there is no evidence—zero—of anything other than the most extreme policy agenda for the nation’s public schools.

Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy.

IMAGE: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump (L) stands with Betsy DeVos after their meeting at the main clubhouse at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, U.S., November 19, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Segar

Gates Foundation To Keep Pushing On Teacher Quality

Gates Foundation To Keep Pushing On Teacher Quality

By Katherine Long, The Seattle Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — Working on reforming the U.S. education system is the hardest job they’ve ever tackled, Bill and Melinda Gates said Wednesday — more difficult and complex, even, than trying to find a cure for malaria.

In the first major retrospective address on their educational philanthropy work in seven years, the couple that leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation acknowledged that many issues surrounding education improvement have become politicized, and success has been hard to prove.

But they reiterated their focus on teacher training as a key to improving education, defended the use of testing as one way to measure teacher and student performance, and said the Common Core state standards are starting to show results.

The Gateses both spoke at length during a Gates Foundation-sponsored event, the U.S. Education Forum, a two-day conference being held in Bellevue, Wash., that is bringing together about 250 national education leaders and politicians. It marks the 15th year the foundation has been involved in U.S. education philanthropy.

In 2009, at a similar event, the foundation launched the Empowering Effective Teachers initiative, an attempt to help school districts identify and reward their best teachers, help all teachers improve and weed out the worst. By 2013, according to an Education Week analysis, the Gates Foundation had spent nearly $700 million on its teacher-quality agenda.

Bill Gates acknowledged Wednesday that the foundation is still learning how it can help move the needle on improving the American education system. But he said he believed “we are working on the right problems” — that all students should meet high standards, and that they should be taught by the best teachers.

From the beginning, the Effective Teachers initiative was controversial, in part because of efforts to tie teacher performance to test scores. Many teachers were suspicious of the efforts, fearing they would be ranked on a measure that they argue isn’t a good or reliable measure of their work.

Although he believes teacher training is the right approach, Bill Gates expressed concern about whether the teacher initiative will ultimately have an impact. “A majority of teachers are in systems that don’t really help them improve all that much,” he said.

The foundation’s work to advance Common Core — the set of learning standards that 42 states are now using — has also met with fierce resistance.

Bill Gates acknowledged that the foundation was taken aback by the pushback on Common Core. “The foundation, and some others perhaps, were naive about these rollouts” and what kind of political fallout would come from it, he said.

Melinda Gates said she believes a few states moved too fast into Common Core, particularly in introducing a new layer of tests, which upset parents. “At the political level, there’s a lot of noise,” she said. “But if you go out and survey teachers, they are for the Common Core.”

And the state of Kentucky — the first state to implement Common Core — is starting to see significant improvement in student achievement, she said.

Bill Gates said he thought Common Core became mixed up with issues of over-testing, a concern that the federal government was playing too heavy a hand in local education and Internet-fed myths about the difficulty of the subjects.

Still, he said, “I’m always glad when education becomes a political issue … It’s fundamental to the future of the country, it’s good to see it being discussed.” But he was disappointed that the discussion went “a little off the rails in terms of facts.”

The Effective Teachers initiative focused much of the work on three school districts (in Florida, Pittsburgh and Memphis), and one consortium of charter-school operators. Those districts created new evaluation systems and rewarded effective teachers with bonuses.

But in Florida, the effort cost the Hillsborough County school district far more than officials projected, and the foundation cut about 20 percent of the funding it had promised. Very few teachers were fired, and there’s little evidence that the system boosted student achievement.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, the foundation threatened to pull its grant funding after the district and teachers could not come to an agreement over teacher evaluation standards. The two sides eventually came together earlier this year.

Bill Gates said in order to be successful, teacher evaluation systems must be balanced, embraced by teachers, include data that teachers trust and have resources behind it to drive improvement.

“This is where we’re focused,” he said. “Over the next decade we hope to see incredible progress in this.”

But, he added, “it’s a difficult task.”
___
(Note: The Gates Foundation provides financial support for The Seattle Times’ Education Lab project, which focuses on promising approaches to address the biggest challenges in education.)

Photo: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been studying education initiatives, but despite so much effort, success has proved elusive. WoodleyWonderWorks/Flickr

This Week In Crazy: The Liberals Have Conquered Mars

This Week In Crazy: The Liberals Have Conquered Mars

There’s water on Mars! Not to mention a nefarious evil liberal agenda. There’s a new Red Scare coming, America. Are you ready for it?

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Rick Santorum

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t here to tell us where he would have stood on marriage equality. Luckily for us, conservative Republicans have been only too willing to invoke the late reverend’s name and character in the cause of “religious liberty.”

“Religious liberty,” of course, being the gloss right-wing politicians and pundits have tried to put on the privilege of florists, bakers, and — most controversially — government officials to discriminate against same-sex couples under the aegis of the First Amendment right to practice their religion.

(Recall that Glenn Beck notably bragged that he was going to become the MLK of fighting marriage equality. So brave.)

Perhaps noting that his poll numbers were scraping rock bottom, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum thought he’d get in on the game. A few weeks ago, shortly before the last GOP debate, Santorum appeared on the program Marcus and Joni (which airs on the Christian television network Daystar), and drew comparisons between Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than let a gay couple get married on her watch, and — yes — MLK.

It’s possible that one reason Santorum is polling so low right now (0.5 percent right according to Real Clear Politics) is not that he fails to rattle off the conservative talking points — specious comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, ignorance of the concept of judicial review, a willful misunderstanding of civil liberties as they apply to LGBT people — it’s that he’s so damn boring when he does it.

Take a double dose of Red Bull, scaffold your eyelids open, and behold SantorumBot 3000 process moldy right-wing analogies to Nuremberg and civil rights leaders of the past, not to mention a tasteless invocation of the Columbine shooting (Kim Davis is like the girl who was killed because she believed in God, Santorum had said, except that isn’t what happened).

Per Right Wing Watch:

Santorum defended Davis, claiming that she should be “applauded” for her “courageous” actions and asserting that the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage is illegitimate since it violates biblical precepts.

“Clearly, the laws on marriage don’t follow the natural law, they don’t follow God’s law, so in Martin Luther King’s viewpoint, he would have said that this is a law that you have an obligation to resist and that’s what Kim Davis is doing,” he said. “She is standing up and saying, ‘I am not going to follow an unjust law.’”

Let us give thanks to far-right ideologues like Santorum: As long as they are on hand to tell us what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said and done, it’s almost like he’s still with us. Thank you, senator.

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Donna Hearne

4. Donna Hearne

jpegAhmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-schooler who reassembled a digital clock in a pencil case and was arrested for his trouble, has become a flashpoint for conservative cranks who believe that the boy’s arrest and the subsequent backlash against the Irving, Texas police force and school officials responsible have all been part of a big fraud. Some theories are more elaborate than others.

Enter Donna Hearne, executive director of the Constitutional Coalition, whose mission is to educate “others to understand and know our Constitution, acknowledging absolutes as the basis for our laws and God as the giver of freedom, and researching issues through the lens of the Constitution.”

Hearne is a former Reagan appointee to the U.S. Department of Education, and is now an outspoken advocate against the Common Core — and when I say “outspoken,” I mean Hearne sees the Common Core as nothing less than a “long war” waged by “the progressive, autocratic elite to completely transfer all decisions concerning children from parents, teachers and school boards to themselves, and to completely transform America from a nation of responsible, moral, independent human beings endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to robots and servants of the state.”

Hearne, blogging in the Conservative Pundit Tuesday, said that liberals’ outpouring of support for Mohamed and condemnation of comments critical of Muslims, such of those of presidential candidate Ben Carson, is entirely misplaced:

Did the school board, the Irving police and Dr. Carson understand American’s founding principles as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence that there are certain truths that come from the Judeo-Christian God such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government is to secure these rights? Did they understand some of the basic tenants of Sharia law: Sharia trumps the Constitution? Sharia law condones female genital mutilation, honor killing, amputation, crucifixion, beheadings (all anti-life) and NO opposition voices or freedom of speech? Did they know that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims want Sharia law and of that 25 percent are okay with violence against Americans?

Whoa. If you think Hearne’s little sashay from discussing a teenage tinkerer in Texas to female genital mutilation (all in one paragraph) is a bit much, just wait. In distressingly quick fashion, she segues from the New York City school board’s decision to close schools for Muslim holidays to an Islamic plot to turn the U.S. into a “totalitarian slave camp.”

Just as quickly, she doubles back to her bête noire: the Common Core, which has undermined America by failing to teach children about their own heritage (“America’s Judeo-Christian foundations” and so forth) as well as the “dangers of civilization jihad.”

“Uninformed and ignorant citizens become slaves of the state,” Hearnes concludes. Her new self-published book is out now.

Next: Michael Savage 

3. Michael Savage

Screenshot: YouTube

Michael Savage would like educated Catholics to take a good long look at this pope fella, or as he calls him, the “atheist” who “genuflects.” It seems like Savage is going to go off on a mirthless riff off a Seinfeld routine (“What’s the deal with the pontiff, huh?”), but it turns out this is just the opening salvo in Savage’s weekly performance of metastatic indignation — where each outrage feeds a new, unrelated outrage — each more nonsensical than the last.

No, the real target of Savage’s ire on his Savage Nation show last week was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the “liberal weasel Jew.”

“Everything about him sets off comedic shockwaves in me,” Savage says, identifying Sanders with the type of “atheist Jew” he has avoided all his life. “They hated America. They hated Christians. I know the type. I ran from them. They made me sick.”

He further accuses Sanders of being “a running dog of the Hillary Clinton camp,” a “warmup act,” because his progressive “nonsense” makes her look like a centrist by comparison.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226309439″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

This is all pretty tame, considering just a few weeks ago, Savage likened Pope Francis and Sanders to the Cambodian genocidal dictator Pol Pot. Savage claimed that the reforms they suggested would turn “street thugs in Baltimore” into a homegrown Khmer Rouge.

Sanders, he said, would end up “giving them a gun and a badge, telling them to go out and round up anybody with eyeglasses, and call them the enemy of the state and put them into internment camps, work camps, and they wound up with a mountain of skulls. […] That’s where this rhetoric leads, don’t you understand that?”

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/224174261″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

That Savage — what a sensible fellow.

Via Right Wing Watch

Next: Rush Limbaugh

2. Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh radioIf you are Rush Limbaugh, the velcro-voiced lout of the airwaves, the stunning announcement from NASA this week that there is flowing water on the surface of Mars is really just there to remind you of all the irksome, terrifying forces gathering to smother your way of life.

These include: the nefarious liberal agenda to foist phony climate change science upon the American public, the corrupting influence of President Obama on absolutely everything he touches, and the insidious Muslim plot to control and co-opt every branch of government — including those concerned with exploring space.

According to Limbaugh, the revelation of briny streams on the Martian surface was just an excuse for so-called “scientists” to trot out their theories about how Mars’ arid, lifeless surface is possibly attributable to an environmental calamity in the Red Planet’s past.

“I’m sorry folks, but that’s not science,” Limbaugh insists, shutting the experts down, “and that’s not even a good wild guess. How can there be a catastrophic event on Mars when there is nobody there to experience the catastrophe? How can there be a catastrophe on Mars when we can’t even prove it? All we can do is wild guess it?”

(This is the same limp canard creationists and climate change deniers wheel out when they want to dismiss the overwhelming body of geological, radiological, and biological evidence. Nobody was there, and so it can’t be known what happened. Talking snakes, on the other hand… but I digress.)

Limbaugh’s asinine aria (courtesy of some courageous transcribing from Media Matters) continues:

NASA wants to go to Mars. And Obama has turned NASA over to Muslim outreach, in case you’ve forgotten. NASA wants the money to go to Mars. It makes total sense in the world that they would time, NASA, the release of, “Look what we found! We found flowing water on Mars! On my god. there could be life! On my god, we gotta go we gotta go!” And here comes the movie [Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi film, The Martian]. They throw in climate change relationships just for a little dot the I, cross the T, and magic happens.

[…] NASA’s been converted to Muslim outreach. They want to go back to Mars. Hell, that’s fine. I mean, I’m not opposed to going to Mars. I’m big on exploring. The problem — everything that Obama touches has been corrupted and by corrupted, I mean converted to liberalism. Everything that exists here exists for the purpose of advancing the Obama agenda.

If Limbaugh really wants to go to exploring Mars, perhaps the Islamic-Obama-Space consortium can arrange a one-way ticket.


ViaMedia Matters

Next: Alex Jones

1. Alex Jones

Screen Shot 2015-10-01 at 1.31.55 PMI think it’s safe to say nobody would ever turn to Alex Jones, the prolific conspiracy monger, for an insightful, rational take on the day’s events. This is the same man, after all, who fanned the flames on the mass delusion that a military training exercise was some kind of federal plot to conquer Texas. Jones, the country’s most reliably prodigious paranoiac, has also been one of the loudest proponents of the “theory” that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that nobody listens to this crank. (Oh wait, never mind. Jones’ website got 8.5 million visitors last month.)

Anyway, the bombastic Jones recently cooked up a video that Addicting Info suggests is “easily the most batsh*t crazy” segment the InfoWars host has ever produced, which is no small claim.

Using Salon‘s controversial decision to publish an op-ed by an admitted pedophile as a peg, Jones weaves together his most inspired conspiracy tapestry yet, threading together a “greatest hits” of our nation’s pet paranoias into an elaborate Grand Unified Big Bad Government Theory.

Jones really gets the band back together here: disease-causing vaccines, defense contractors that feed on children’s brains, Jerry Sandusky, transgender bathrooms, the pope (whom The Big Evil State has apparently blackmailed), the sale of baby body parts, public human sacrifices perpetrated by (who else?) the United Nations, “trendy” liberals, the welfare state, death panels, “torture and necrophilia dungeons,” — it’s all part of “an act of domination, an act of control” perpetrated by what he calls the Pot Bellied Pedophile Network (PBP).

The fact that Jones spends the segment wearing a clown mask and blood soaked gloves, speaking in an occasionally incomprehensible voice pretending to be a serial killer in charge of the PBP, is the most reasonable thing in evidence here.

“We’re not just gonna sexually abuse your children,” Jones growls in his masked-clown-as-Big-Evil-State persona, “We’re gonna forcibly inoculate them with deadly pathogens known to brain-damage ’em. We’re gonna rape their brains, rape their minds, and make you take care of em for decades. […] Because that’s what we like to do. And you’re so weak and pathetic you’ll do whatever you tell you.”

“Crawl in your hole and die. The Earth belongs to us,” he concludes. “Your children belong to us now. Submit to the New World Order. Submit to liberalism. Submit to trendiness. Give us full control!” And he signs off with a maniacal laugh.

Via Addicting Info

—

Illustration: Marxist Mars (National Memo)

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012

5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012

Predicting doom for Democrats and taking Republican-inflated scandals seriously is a job description for much of the media. And while in full pearl-clutching mode over the Democratic frontrunner, as they usually are, they’re missing the real story: The Republican Party, after eight years of plotting the demise of Barack Obama, is in far worse shape than it was the last time it lost the presidency.

What is supposed to be “the best field of Republican candidates in a generation” is being trounced by a birther, a fetal-tissue-experimenting doctor, a disgraced, anti-vaxxer CEO, and the guy who is only known for shutting down the government.

Oh, yeah, the birther is also an anti-vaxxer.

It’s only August, but the Republican right is on the verge of duplicating or tripling down on every mistake its leaders told themselves not to make after they lost last time, while inventing new flubs beyond the imagination of mortal satirists. Sure, the Koch network has doubled its spending commitment from 2012 to close to a billion dollars and it’s difficult for any party to hold the White House for three straight terms. But conservatives are at war with themselves, while their candidates are spouting nonsense and purposely alienating precisely the same voters they need to be winning over.

Why aren’t the media pointing this out?

“I know that it’s disturbing to read columns that portray the entire field as a bunch of cranks,” The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman wrote. “But it would be a dereliction of duty, basically an act of dishonest reporting, to pretend that they aren’t.”

So let’s do our duty and point out why this August is even worse for Republicans than the summer of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain.

1. Donald Trump is the most anti-immigrant frontrunner of a major party imaginable.
Birtherism made him a conservative hero. Xenophobic rants where he simultaneously promises to bring back jobs from China and cut wages in America speak to a real angst among the white working class that has been battered by conservative and neoliberal policies. But it’s Trump’s promise to deport 11 million immigrants that is most corrosive to the Republican brand. His newly released immigration plan would have denied citizenship to a couple of his competitors and wives. To even have a chance of winning Florida, the GOP needs to do at least as well with minorities as it did in 2004 — pre-Katrina, before the conservative backlash on immigration.

Immigration isn’t the only issue Latinos and Asian-Americans care about, but even Mitt Romney’s embrace of “self-deportation” conjured up images of broken families. Trump seems to be vowing to deport even U.S. citizens who had undocumented parents. The idea of mass deportations may appeal to a large segment of GOP primary voters, but we rarely discuss how suggesting people be jammed into buses and trains damages a party that’s spent decades relying on the frame of smaller government. Promoting a police state powerful enough to turn humans into cargo marked for destinations unknown, combined with promises to close marijuana shops in Colorado and Washington, while seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade so miscarriages can be investigated as murders — these eccentric ideas may well combine to taint the party’s image, possibly beyond repair.

2. Real conservatives know Trump is their worst nightmare.
Simply put: 2016 is the most important election of our lifetime, especially if you’re a GOP donor who sees the chance of building a solid majority of seven conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Many of these high-powered donors and establishment figures see Trump for what he is: a thin-skinned megalomaniac who holds few if any conservative beliefs beyond the basic impulse to make himself richer. Even scarier to them is seeing a guy who can go to war with hives of villainy like Fox News and RedState — and win.

When establishment conservatives face off against Trump supporters, it’s like turning over a rock and releasing the hate-infested, bigoted microbes that grew in the dank, moldy environment of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Understandably, they’re disgusted by what they’ve created, and some sense of justice deep in their collective conscience likely fears that they deserve to be consumed by it.

Watching as Trump validates every Democratic argument against Scott Walker’s jobs record or Carly Fiorina’s lack of business acumen must feel like a repeat of Newt Gingrich’s highly successful assault on Romney’s business record at Bain Capital. But the difference is that Trump isn’t playing with Adelson’s money, and he isn’t dependent on Republican benefactors to keep him in the .01 percent.

Trump has little to no chance of winning the GOP nomination, but he has a decent chance of leading the polls even as the establishment candidate racks up the delegates necessary to win. The damage that would do to the party is as impossible to imagine as Trump’s ridiculous campaign itself.

Continue reading: Jeb Bush, Obamacare, and the Government Shutdown

3. Jeb Bush is flailing.
It may seem insane that your name is Bush, and you think the Iraq War is a winning issue for you. Well, George W. Bush left office with about 30 percent of America thinking he was doing a good job. And much of that 30 percent will vote in the GOP primary. W. remains much more popular with America and the GOP base than Jeb has ever been. He may have lost two wars and failed to prevent 9/11 or the financial crisis, but he never backed Common Core. And while Jeb’s willingness to pass immigration reform mirrors his brother’s — and Ronald Reagan’s, for that matter — W. was a master at hiding his disdain for the GOP base. He would never suggest, as insultingly as Jeb did, that the GOP nominee must be willing to lose the primary to win the general election.

But Jeb Bush is certainly nailing the first part of that equation. He looks squeamish onstage next to Trump, and stiff as he comes out against spending on “women’s health.” Suddenly he’s realizing that he was doing better before, when he couldn’t come up with a good answer on Iraq — mostly because Democrats were attacking him. So this week he decided to try some more lying about Iraq while endorsing torture. This doesn’t differentiate him from the GOP field, but it does remind the base that it’s kind of a family tradition for him.

4. There could be a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood.
Opposing Planned Parenthood and shutting down the government would be fantastic issues for Republicans — if there were no such thing as general elections. The GOP base is demanding that Republican leaders make a principled stand, much as they did in 2013 against Obamacare. But the difference is that Planned Parenthood is popular, much more popular than any politician or political party, especially in swing states.

Such an act of extremism against women’s health — one year before the election that will decide the fate of Roe v. Wade — would be a dream come true for progressives, which is why Republican leaders are vowing to avoid it. But given the energy that this phony issue has developed among the conservative base, and the fear of an approaching GOP primary, the party’s leaders on Capitol Hill may be upstaged by Ted Cruz once again.

5. Obama and Obamacare are failing to fail, magnificently.
In 2011, Republicans were running against a president who had passed a controversial health care reform bill that had seen few benefits roll out. Now, four years later, 15 million Americans have gained health insurance while the economy is in the middle of the longest private sector job expansion in history. Obama’s second term is on pace to see the third most jobs created in any presidential term ever. And this is the term when Obama’s most transformative policies — the first new taxes on the rich and the full rollout of Obamacare — went into effect.

Promising to take health insurance away from 15 million Americans is still popular with the GOP base, but former Bush speechwriter David Frum gets that this promise may not play so well in the general election.

“More than 80 percent of those who have gained coverage under the ACA were pleased with the coverage they got,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “Everything we know about voters tells us that they are much more motivated to protect something they already have than to vote to gain something new.”

Frum presents ways Republicans could vow to improve Obamacare. None of them — especially changing the funding mechanism to a carbon tax, which would be awesome — would ever be embraced by a GOP presidential candidate. It is true that Frum, a native of single-payer Canada, has long dissented from conservative orthodoxy on Obamacare, but he gets why Romney lost.

Mitt’s Obamacare paternity was baked into his numbers when he won the primary. His indelible betrayal of conservatism as Massachusetts governor kept him from truly veering to the center in the general election. But what happens next summer when a conservative Republican candidate realizes that he actually can’t vow to destroy Obamacare and win? Will the base forgive him before November for turning reasonable?

Never count the GOP out. After a decade of wrecking nearly everything it touched, it only took them six years to win back Congress. And a country that has made horrible choices out of fear of terror and foreigners could do it again, especially when voters lack the protection of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for the first presidential election since 1968. Conservatives are on the verge of a massive rebuke or a ridiculous vindication. And if you look at what they’ve learned — and failed to learn — since 2012, it’s easy to see which is more likely.

Illustration: DonkeyHotey